Songs of Freedom
by Quarto
Summary: Humanity is the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape. Sometimes, so is love.
1. Chapter 1

Header notes:

And now for something completely different. I don't generally write explanations for these things but this one is a little unusual and wildly AU and so I feel the need to tell you a bit about it before we start. This is fanfic of fanfic. Specifically, it's a prequel to Mizjoely's wonderful Sherlolly WIP, "The Side of the Angels." While it's not necessary to have read that one to understand this one, you should anyway, it's great. Fair warning that it's a lot more explicit than my story will get. This fic was written with her permission but without her editorial hand so any contradictions or inconsistencies are entirely my fault.

The original prompt that inspired Mizjoely was:

an au where angels are terrifying

an au where angels walk the streets and passers-by cower in fear at the sight of them

an au where angels mark scripture into their skin in languages only they can read or even comprehend

an au where angels spill blood daily for the sake of 'divine justice' and human law enforcement are powerless to stop it

an au where angels are the monsters you warn your children about before bed

Let's begin, shall we?

* * *

Despair.

That's what he senses, the first time, a wave of bleak despair strong enough that it stands out even over the background noise of Almaty, the bustling capital (for a few more months) of Kazakhstan. He follows it to the epicenter, a dilapidated hotel in Plodik, to find a young inky-haired woman sitting on a bed, with a gun in her lap.

She has finally found a crime she is unwilling to commit. Because of this unwillingness, she has been stabbed, in the thigh, by someone she considered her friend. The pain of this injury seems to throb in time with the Russian speed metal being played in the room to the left, which is failing to drown out the sound of an orgy in the room to the right.

She will be hunted for what she's done tonight. Maybe she is being hunted already. And the gun in her lap seems so… enticing. Socket the barrel into the soft palate of her mouth, finger on the trigger, make a fist. The bullet will tear through the brainstem before she has time to feel it, and her violent and useless life will be over.

He observes all this with a calm detachment, not planning to interfere with her decision. Suicide is a grave sin, though not one within his purview, but even a brief glimpse into her shows a soul so tainted by her previous actions that one more really can't do much damage. This surprises him. She can't be more than twenty-five, too young to accumulate such a weight of sin. So he looks closer.

Motherless. Fatherless. Plucked from an orphanage by a CIA front organization while still a child, trained as a deadly but disposable weapon, sent out into the fallen world to do the dirty work of men who wished to keep their own hands clean.

People like her are his lawful prey. But she's small and pretty and sick at heart, and she never really had a chance, did she? He's got a fair amount of latitude in these decisions, and there's some possibility of redemption, albeit a slight one, for her. So he decides to give her the chance she's never had.

"You're still alive," he says, "And that means you still have choices. You can run, far and fast. Then you can see what you can make of your life."

He's not corporeal at the moment, and so his voice is indistinguishable from her own thoughts. She turns the gun in her hands a few more times. Makes it safe, sets it on the filthy bedspread, and limps to the bathroom to put a towel on her wound. In her mind is a faint flickering of _hope._

He murmurs, "Go forth, and sin no more." Then he turns his attention away. Evidently, somewhere in America, someone is suborning _children_ into darkness. He will find them, and when he does he will be _delighted_ to serve as the millstone about their necks.

* * *

He thinks of her, a year later, and goes searching. This time he finds her in a refugee camp in Macedonia. There is war in Kosovo, and half a million people so far have been displaced across the border. Her hair is different, now, brown streaked with candy-apple red, the accent English, the name changed (and he wonders if her selection of the name of one of the mothers of God was meaningful), but she is still small and slight and pretty. She's explaining in Albanian to a shattered elderly woman that if she wants to go join her son in Sweden she will have to wait, for an indeterminate length of time, as that country is not currently admitting any further applicants for asylum.

The woman is sobbing, and Mary offers her a tissue, puts an arm around her shoulders. Then she frowns, and cocks her head.

She looks around the office where they are sitting, seeking… him? Seeking something, anyway. But he can't be seen by mortal eyes if he doesn't wish to be, and he does not.

* * *

The third time he sees her is purely by accident, since they are on the same battlefield. And he's disappointed at first, because she has returned to her old work, and three men lie dead around her. She cleans the blood off her knives, calmly, and tugs off the mask that covered her pretty face and bright-blue hair.

They are in an abandoned warehouse, and she looks around, paying no further attention to the corpses at her feet, until she finds a locked door. Mary taps on it, and softly calls out, "Girls, are you in there?" in Kituba, the local _lingua franca_. She receives no answer, but efficiently picks the locks and lets the light from the dead men's lanterns into a dark, dank pit of a room.

There are twenty girls and young women in there, all young, all terrified. She looks like what she is, an interloper in their country, another bit of the detritus of colonialism, but she says "Grandmother Mukonondo sent me. I'm here to bring you home."

And the image of a wise old matriarch who is in fact grandmother (or great-grandmother) to several of them blossoms in their minds, and they relax, and step into the light.

With the assistance of some of the older kidnapping victims, Mary steals a farm truck, fills it with the girls, and drives for ten hours on bad roads, crossing the unreliable border into Uganda. She has far less trouble doing this than she had expected thanks to just a _bit_ of divine assistance. There, in the refugee camp where she was working, she witnesses twenty happy reunions and loses her job, because she has just broken cover quite spectacularly.

Mary accepts getting fired with equanimity. She spends a quiet evening drinking with a document forger in a bar in Kampala and walks away with yet another identity, taking the last name of the barkeeper, but keeping Mary, since she likes it and it pairs well with Morstan.

He can't help but be proud of her.

* * *

He's stopped pretending that it's his responsibility to keep following up with her any longer.

He keeps following up with her anyway, and declines to think about why.

Mary's in England, now, going to nursing school, with the idea of joining _Medecins Sans Frontieres_ and shipping back out to the difficult parts of the world once she's finished. She lives off her savings, which are small given that work in human service universally pays badly. But they, and the income from part-time translation gigs, are barely enough to pay the rent for a miniscule bedsit in the bad part of Peckham. Mary walks through this troubled neighborhood with the calm confidence of someone who knows she is extremely unlikely to meet anyone more dangerous than herself.

She leads a quiet life, one of small pleasures. An elderly regular at the homeless shelter where she volunteers, who adores her ever-changing rainbow hair and talks about how she reminds him of his daughter. A local stray cat who she feeds and who therefore vaguely tolerates her, enough to allow her to pet it when it is pleased to be pet. A bookshelf that she finds in a skip and refinishes, over the course of a week, until it is beautiful. A cobalt-blue suncatcher that hangs in her single window and puts spots of color on her face in the mornings. A weekly treat of a cup of coffee rich with cream and hazelnut syrup, bought at the Costa.

She's very lonely, of course. But she's never been any other way and so she's not fully aware of it and it doesn't make her particularly unhappy.

This is something he understands.

It hadn't always been that way for him. There were millenia in which he was entirely occupied with the work of the creation, and then there was war in heaven and he was filled with divine purpose. In those days, he'd had boon companions, friends and family, who had been as close to him as anyone could want.

But now? His sister has retreated into philosophy, and is more remote and melancholy every time they meet. And his friend, who had been closer than any brother…

Ever since the maker had commanded them to act openly in the world, Sherlock has grown eccentric, and to be eccentric either by the standard of angels or by the standard of Sherlock is to be odd indeed. His friend spends his time monitoring the flights of bees and the fall of tobacco ashes, endlessly challenging himself to develop an understanding independent of the universal flow of knowledge granted to all their kind.

Sherlock is learning the world. But while he does that, he has left his friend behind.

* * *

He returns to her, again, but this time she's in love.

There is absolutely nothing the matter with David, the man she loves. David is another professional do-gooder, a solicitor who specializes in child protection. He's likely to be a good provider for Mary, he's kind, and he's desperately in love with _her_.

This should be a proud moment for him, seeing the two of them picnicking in Hampstead Heath. It's a significant accomplishment, after all, to take a desperate sinner and by the application of nothing more than mercy and a handy escape hatch enable her to transform into an official Good Person™. The fact that she is now embarking upon a life of traditional civic virtue where she can produce two-point-five adorable blonde children who she will undoubtedly rear to help heal the world is a sign of his _success_.

He shouldn't resent the quiet little flame of contentment in her heart.

He shouldn't be envious of any mortal man, even one who gets to drowse in her lap while she sips prosecco from a plastic cup and reads her magazine.

If she ever truly was able to sense him, she doesn't show any sign of it any longer.

* * *

There's an element of self flagellation in returning to Mary the next time, but he does, because she's a touchstone in his increasingly isolated existence even though she has no idea he exists. And to his guilty relief, she's alone again. David is gone, and she seems fine with that.

Like many before her, Mary has learned that the downtrodden can be found wherever she goes, and has thus decided against returning to war zones for now. She's instead parlayed her volunteer work at the homeless shelter into a permanent position providing medical care to London's growing population of rough sleepers.

She's bought a place to live, a tiny terraced house at the very far end of the Metropolitan line. It was sold to Mary as a "fixer-upper" suitable for "modernization" though anyone sensible, looking at it, would think that a can full of gasoline and a match might provide the best sort of modernization possible. Mary does not care that it's awful, and is ecstatic at having somewhere, for the first time, that is _hers_. Her favorite bit is the triangular scrap of garden at the back. Unattended for decades, it is overgrown tangle of trash plants. Previous attempts at clearing it have inspired her to come back, this time with a machete.

Mary has cut her hair very short, bleached it white-blonde. It sets off the fine bones of her shoulders and face as she works in the yard, kneeling to hack at the heavy stalks of weeds. Bees buzz around her, drawn by the smell of her sweat in the hot sun.

Then she stops, lifts up her head, and curls her fingers more tightly on the handle of the machete. She's sensing him, again. It's a mystery.

"Look, I know you're there. Where are you hiding? Come out," she calls, tensing her muscles for an attack.

And for some reason, perhaps because she _is_ still a mystery to him five years in, he does, taking the shape he has worn for millennia. Mary's jaw drops, and for a moment they face one another in the tiny garden, silent but for the hum of the bees.

"Right," Mary says, eventually, "I'd like- I'd like to be standing for this, if you don't mind."

She rises to her feet, leaving the blade on the ground. Her hands are shaking, so she folds them into fists. Lifting her chin, she looks him square in the eyes, and says, "You could have saved a lot of lives if you'd turned up fifteen years ago."

"I am not here to hurt you, Mary," he says, softly, touched by this woman who faces him with such courage, "All sins can be forgiven, and every soul can be redeemed."

Mary exhales all her breath with a shudder, and wraps her arms around herself, sinks back to the ground on weak knees. The shaking of her hands has spread through her entire body. She looks up at him through swimmy eyes and asks, "Did you come to tell me I have to... confess? Because- I can do that. I can do that," she repeats, more firmly the second time.

He should say yes. She's a human and is thus supposed to submit to human justice where such is available to her. But when he thinks of this vivacious, vibrant woman locked in a prison he can't find the heart to say that single syllable.

"Just- keep on with your good work. Redemption is the labor of a lifetime."

"I will!" Mary nods rapidly in agreement, "I promise I will. Thank you, thank you!"

He has never before touched her, but this time he takes a knee next to her. He kisses her forehead and vanishes, leaving her alone in the garden.

* * *

Mary's tiny house is in a state of chaos (or construction) the next time he visits, materializing soundlessly in the kitchen. A one-eyed, starveling, and vicious-looking tomcat saunters up to him (cats having no appropriate respect for angels) and starts batting at the white feathers of his wings. He waggles a wingtip, tantalizingly, and the cat rolls onto its back and starts trying to mangle his pinions and that's when Mary kicks open the kitchen door and makes an abortive attempt to knock his brains out with a two-by-four.

She has excellent reflexes, so as soon as she sees that it's him she's able to convert a violent assault into a stumble. The board never gets near his head, not that it could have done him any harm if it had. Then she drops the plank with a clatter, raises her hands in the air, and yelps, "I've been good!"

"I know," he replies. She puts more effort into being good than almost anyone he's ever seen, possibly because it does _not_ come naturally. "Are you always so frightened that someone is going to attack you?"

"Well, just because it hasn't happened yet- I mean, no. Not _always_ ," Mary says, lying without even being aware that she's lying. That constant sense of threat hanging over her head must be exhausting, he thinks, with more sympathy than he generally has for a human.

"So what _do_ you want?" she asks curiously.

He does not hesitate. _Angels_ do not hesitate. But he feels foolish and suspicious when he says, "I wanted to see how you were doing."

Mary's theological education was extremely limited and thus she does not recognize precisely how unusual this sort of behavior is. She frowns, and asks, "Are you… my _guardian_ angel?" a concept which for her comes with hazy mental images of little people in white robes sitting on one's shoulders and, for some reason, singing crickets. This sort of imagery has entirely fallen out of the popular culture in the last decade, ever since real angels began to walk the world in their own forms. Nowadays his kind are spoken of in whispers and in somber voices on news reports.

"No, there's no such thing."

"Oh," and Mary continues, confusedly, "Well. I guess I'm… fine? Work's good? Nothing much else is going on? I'm replacing a wall? The plaster's all rotted?"

"Ah. Would you like some help?"

Mary throws her hands in the air in bewildered surrender and says, "Yeah. Sure. Why not? It's not as though I can afford a contractor. Let's get an angel in instead."

* * *

Every time he comes back to the tiny house at the end of the Metropolitan line, it is incrementally less terrible. Mary has boundless energy for home renovation, and once she's gotten past the awkwardness of having a celestial being volunteering to help with it makes faster progress than she'd ever hoped.

He's never before spent much time in the company of a human, and despite himself he finds that he admires this tendency of theirs… the way they remake their little corners of the world, without a hundredth of the resources he has, just using brute force and ignorance. The place, over time, comes to represent peace for him- an island of quiet comfort away from his endless, harsh work.

They talk. Carefully, at first, because Mary is quite legitimately afraid of him. But over time she relaxes, and the wry, intelligent and funny woman he'd seen glimpses of for years is back on display. She's curious about him, naturally enough… his continued interest in her is somewhat less usual, but still real. In fact if anything it's gotten stronger now that he actually gets to speak with her.

Over the course of several months, she becomes his friend, a new member of a very small group.

"Do you have a name?" she asks, one day, paint dripping onto her face as she coats the ceiling.

"I have."

She looks down at him from her jerry-rigged scaffolding and asks, "So... what is it?"

"You couldn't pronounce it."

"I bet I could."

"No, you couldn't," he says, with absolute confidence, slapping paint on with vigor. There are species that have the vocal organs necessary to pronounce his name, but humans are not on that list.

"I," she informs him loftily, "Speak twelve languages, six of them well enough to pass for native. I might surprise you. And I can't keep calling you "the angel who comes by my house." So what is it?"

So he tells her his name, and she makes what he has to admit is a very good stab at it, for a human, starting off with "Zhvjawn-" but then dwindling down into something that sounds like she's gargling a cat.

He smiles up at her, and she blushes, prettily.

"To be fair," Mary says, "I'm pretty sure there were _windchimes_ in that."

" _The music of the spheres."_

"How would you feel about being called John?"

"John is fine."

And John he is, forever after.

* * *

When finally it happens it seems as natural and inevitable as sunrise. They are making the garden, and John's stacking bricks to build an elevated flowerbed when he notices Mary staring at his forearms, at the shining scripture that decorates them and the flex of the musculature below.

"Yes?" he asks, and she blinks and replies, "Sorry. Sorry. Nothing. Just woolgathering," but in her mind is a surge of profound desire and the clear thought, "Girl, you are going to hell."

The idea is new to him, but… promising. Even before it was frowned upon he has never gone with a human. There was always that faint hint of bestiality around the idea. But there is nothing bestial about Mary. She's small and slight and pretty and tries so hard to be good, and her mouth is soft and tastes of tea and strawberry jam.

Eventually she pulls back, and murmurs, "I had thought angels were sexless."

So John asks, "Do you want to find out?"


	2. Chapter 2

"It's funny," she says, much later, and the lazy happiness in her voice fills him with delight.

"What is?"

"I had honestly thought that the wings were magic. But they're just… feathers, and bones and skin and all that. Just real wings."

Nothing about him is magic, but it _is_ ethereal, so he corrects her, "No, they're not really."

"It's not a complaint. They're terribly erotic. But they're real. They have _down._ "

John tries to put a complex concept into words Mary can understand.

"They're more like _clothes_ , really. I make them, with my mind. Same as all the rest of me."

This is true, and at the moment he is grateful that he's stayed with the classic human-ish shape for so long. Mary probably wouldn't have been interested in what they have just done if he had appeared to her as a wheel with eyes or a gryphon or any of the other fashionable forms of angels. She seems skeptical of his statement, so he continues, "Here, go pull a feather out," and then when Mary hesitates, he says, "You can't hurt me. It's all right."

Mary plucks one of the white feathers, gingerly, and in her fingers he turns it dove grey, then magpie black-and-white, then the vivid green of the turaco before making it disappear entirely. She giggles quietly and runs her fingers over the silver writing on his chest, and asks, "And will you take me flying with your magical wings?"

"I can't. You live in physical reality, I only visit it. And in physical reality these couldn't even lift _me_ , let alone both of us. They'd need to be more than twice the size. It'd violate natural law."

"If God had wanted us to fly we'd have been born with wings, hm?"

He wraps his wings around her, and kisses the tips of her fingers as they lay cradled in whiteness.

"He's fine with you flying. You just have to build your own."

* * *

This new element between them quickly becomes as natural as the rest of it, and Mary's bed becomes the center of his life.

Afterwards, John can't be certain quite when it happened. He just realizes, one day, that he's in love with her and has been for some time now. He tells her this, almost shyly, with his heart on his lips, and she smiles widely and returns the gift in equal measure.

He hadn't thought it was possible to be so happy.

* * *

"I'll tell you what mine mean if you tell me what yours mean."

"Mine don't mean _anything_. It's different for us."

"Quid pro quo, Mary."

"Fine, if you insist. What's... _this_ one?"

"It says, "Do not think that I came to bring peace on earth. I did not come to bring peace but a sword."

"Huh."

"Your turn. What's this one mean?"

"It means I was once seventeen and drunk."

"Mary…"

" _Okay_. But basically I was wasted in Budapest and I had always liked her and a tattoo seemed like the thing to do at the moment. It wasn't a particularly profound decision."

"So it's not... you, if you were an angel?"

"No. No it's not. Though that would have been rather interesting if it was. It's Tinker Bell. She's a fairy. Now. What's… _this_ one?

"I am become Death, destroyer of worlds."

"That's not from the Bible, is it? Oppenheimer said that, at the a-bomb tests."

"He got it out of the _Bhagavad Gita_. What's that one?"

" _That_ is actually a bullet wound. Almost had my name on it, too, I had already started moving when she fired and so she just grazed me. How about this?"

"O you who believe! Stand out firmly for justice as witnesses to God, even as against yourselves, or your parents, or your kin, and whether it be against rich or poor."

"Do you ever think you're a bit inclined to be overdramatic?"

"I _am_ a messenger of God. I believe I'm just the right amount of dramatic. What's that one?"

"Oh, stop it, that tickles! I got that one when I was a girl. I lost my footing on my bike pedals and the gears cut my calf open."

" _You_ rode a bicycle."

"My childhood wasn't _entirely_ about learning ways to kill people, yes I rode a bicycle."

"And how about this?"

"Hang on, it's **my** turn. And _that_ … is my left nipple. It has _very_ little meaning."

"Oh, I'm not sure. It seems... very profound. Very important."

"Oh _dear_ please keep doing that."

* * *

One quiet evening, for no particular reason, John asks, "You used to change your hair all the time. What happened?"

Mary ruffles her short blonde bob and sighs ruefully.

"I originally started doing it to draw attention away from my face and let me alter my appearance quickly. I haven't needed to do that for years, so I was just keeping on because I liked it. But unfortunately at a certain point having weird hair stops saying to people 'I'm cute and quirky' and starts saying 'I'm an old hag desperately clinging to my youth.' _And_ I've got a grownup job now. _Sic transit gloria mundi_ , I suppose."

She doesn't notice that she's started his mind racing. Because now that she's said it, he sees that Mary is _not_ old, not yet. She's barely thirty, in the prime of her life, and she's never looked more beautiful than she does at this moment. But time _is_ passing for her, every day. The crinkles that form around her eyes when she smiles no longer fade back into pristine smoothness when she stops.

Someday all her smiles will stop, and so will pass the glory of the world.

John takes her into the bedroom and makes love to her with more than the usual intensity, and when she sleeps in his arms he tries not to hear the soft beat of her heart as a countdown.

* * *

He's neglecting his duties.

Really, he finds he can hardly stand them anymore.

Sympathizing with one of them has made it too easy to sympathize with all of them. The world is full of sinners deserving the wrath of an angry God, and almost without exception they don't _really_ mean it. They do what they do because they are desperate, stupid, badly trained, addled by some sort of chemical…

Hardly any of them _want_ to do anything evil at all. But they still do, all the time, over and over again.

Finally he gives up, and grabs the two men he has been watching (professional criminals, history of violent assaults, currently breaking into the house of an elderly woman) by the scruffs of their necks and knocks their heads together.

"I could incinerate you where you stand with no more consequences to myself than a pat on the back and a 'Nice work, John, same time tomorrow?' You have such short lives and _this_ is what you choose to do with them? _Straighten up_. I _will_ be watching."

John hauls them off, gibbering, to the nearest police station, and goes back to Mary.

She's holding the remote control and says "So you were just on the news-" when he comes in… through the door, because surprising her still tends to make her think she's going to be attacked.

He interrupts her with, "Mary, I can't stand this any longer. I want to stop. I want to be human, and stay with you for as long as we have."

Mary does not fling herself into his arms and start kissing him at this declaration. She switches off the television and says, "Is that even an option?"

"I don't know. But I'm going to ask."

She seems to be searching for the right words, and finally defaults to, " _Why-?"_

"I can't go on with my life, knowing all the time that you're aging. That someday you're going to die, and leave me- alone."

Mary rolls her eyes and says, "Oh for Christ's sake, John."

She does _not_ do casual blasphemy in front of him, and he's startled. She continues, "That is _exactly_ what would happen anyway. If of course I don't croak out from breast cancer when I'm fifty or get shot to death tomorrow. Or, ooh, heck, maybe I could outlive _you_? That sounds like a _real_ treat. Hate to break it to you, but in this shitty setup you lot have going down here, living long enough to watch the person you love best in the world die of old age counts as a bloody _victory_."

Mary doesn't show this nasty cynicism to him, normally. He'd expected her to be… well, pleased about it.

"I hadn't realized," he says slowly, "That you were so angry with him."

"I wasn't," she returns, "Until about eight years ago when all these angels started showing up and I found out he actually exists."

" _Yes_ , if I do this… I'll die. Someday. But there's always the hope of heaven, together, and that's a human place and _I can't go there_. Not as an angel, anyway."

Mary actually laughs softly.

"Yeah, but John, we both know that going to heaven is a pretty farfetched thing for me to hope for."

John stands stock-still.

"You _said,_ " Mary emphasizes, "That there are a thousand harbors for the soul and that its ultimate destination is strictly between it and God. And I've tried to be good, for five years now, but… I'm never going to find out if it's been enough. Until the end."

John curses himself, because he _had_ told her this about the afterlife. He'd just been trying to impress her with his knowledge, but _of course_ she would have taken a personal interest in that.

"Any soul can be redeemed, Mary."

"Can be and _will be_ are two very different things and the gap between them is too wide to throw away immortality and superpowers on hope."

Mary wraps her arms around John, holds him tight, "My beautiful angel. Thank you for wanting this, but no. I decline."

The sweet fragrance of her perfume rises from her small, slight body, and John rests his chin on the top of her head.

"I could give you children, if I were human. You'd be a good mother," he says, quietly, because he's seen the wistful look in her eyes every time she sees a baby.

"I'd love some kids," Mary says into his chest, "But you _having to die_ is not a fair tradeoff. It's not a big deal."

She's so peacefully resigned to all of this, to a life without the family she dreams of, and to an uncertain and grim afterlife.

Almost… suspiciously so.

He'd asked Mary, once, why she'd broken it off with David. She'd shrugged and said, "I loved him just enough that I knew had to let him go so he could be with someone who loved him a whole lot more. If it had been a bit stronger or a bit weaker I'd probably have kept him around forever, he was really very nice to me."

John wonders just how much her love for him can let her sacrifice, and tilts her chin up to look in her eyes and ask, "Are you being noble here?"

Mary smiles at him, and says, "Wish I was, but I'm not, really. I just don't want you to. To be honest I don't even know if I'd like you if you were just… a man. I can get one of those anywhere, they aren't all that special."

Most people, when they're being deceitful, have little signs to show it. Averted eyes, covering the mouth, slight facial tics, things like that. All of these tells were beaten out of Mary at a very young age. And John has kept his promise not to read her mind. She'd insisted on that immediately after learning he could do such a thing.

Even so, it's with absolute confidence that he grins and says, "Liar."

"What?"

"Overegged the pudding there a bit, Morstan. The only reason you didn't strip your clothes off and beg me to take you to bed the minute you met me was because I _wasn't_ a man."

"Excuse me?"

"And you _desperately_ love me now. Sad, really, but inevitable," John sighs, "Still there's nothing for it. I'm off."

"John wait-" but he cuts off whatever she was going to say with a kiss, and vanishes.

* * *

John returns to [The Silver City] where he petitions [more senior angels] in the [celestial hierarchy] for the right to surrender his nature and take up a new one. There is [debate] and [testing].

One of the strangest things about being a human is that although he has a fair number of memories of when he was _not_ a human, the language to describe them, even to himself, is lost. One night he's trying to explain this to Mary and she asks him, "So… just as a f'rinstance, can you tell me what dinosaurs really looked like?"

He searches for the words for a good five minutes before he has to give up and say, "Not the way you're thinking."

There are _some_ memories he can thoroughly describe. Two are painful.

There's the one where he tells his sister what he is going to do, and all she can do is weep, silently.

Then there's the one where Sherlock stares at him, and pronounces, "You've gone mad."

"I don't think so. It feels… it's the right thing to do."

"You would throw all of this away… all your strength, all your knowledge… for an entirely ordinary Human _woman_?"

"She's a child soldier turned freelance assassin-for-hire turned nurse. That's hardly ordinary."

"There are seven _billion_ of them," Sherlock says furiously, "I'm _certain_ we could find others."

"I don't want another, I want this one."

"In thirty years that woman will be old, and in sixty she will be _dead_. And so will _you_ if you go through with this insane plan. Sixty years is _nothing_ to us."

He smiles, and says, "The way I hear it it feels longer from the inside. Look, mate-"

"And why are you speaking like that?"

"Because that's what they - we- talk like. There's _slang_. Sherlock, you're my greatest friend. I don't want that to stop, just because I'm going to change."

"You aren't going to change, you are going to _cease to exist_. To me. To all of us. You will _regret_ this. How often have we seen humans make lifelong commitments to one another only to break them when the hormonal urge to copulate starts to wear off?"

"That won't happen to us."

"Of course it will, you'll be _one of them_."

"Not all of them do that, and I don't plan to. And I'd like- if you could visit. You love that city, so when you're in the neighborhood…"

Sherlock laughs with all the arrogance of their kind, though John can hear the pain beneath it.

"Why would I _ever_ want to do that?"

Apparently Sherlock never wants to, because for twelve years, he never does.

Despite all this agita, John does eventually get what he was after. Following a [trial by ordeal], he's taken to the bare, unremarkable cell of an angel he has never before seen.

He's suffering and beaten. He's never before been either, and it's horrific, and the angel he meets is androgynous and has no wings, no marks of scripture on its body at all.

 _ **Pain like this is part of their lot,**_ it says, _**All of them will experience it, at some point. And all they get in exchange is hope.**_

John draws in a breath and even that hurts.

 _ **This will be the most difficult thing for you. Your pain- and that of others. And you need not suffer it. You can go about your work. The hand of justice will never fall on the woman you love, and she will forget you, and live a long and happy life without you.**_

Temptation is an old friend to him, but this is more difficult than any he's ever before experienced. He can envision Mary, quite clearly, old and fat and white-haired… but happy, and in the throes of pain he almost make himself believe that it'd be best to let her free, to pick up the sword and move on without her.

But _his_ future yawns ahead of him. All of time and space, and he will live forever.

Without her.

No.

"No," he gasps out, "I want this. I can stand the pain."

And the other angel _smiled._

It knelt at his side, kissed his brow, and said, _**Then go. But remember, it is not incumbent upon you to finish the task, but neither are you free to absolve yourself from it. And know that the reward of the righteous is in the world to come.**_

* * *

John materializes, for the last time, in the kitchen of Mary's tiny jewel box house at the end of the Metropolitan line, where he immediately collapses into a heap. Her one-eyed and vicious (but no longer starveling) tomcat hisses and flees, and Mary hastens to his side, wide eyed.

"John, where have you- Oh, God, what have you done to- Oh, your _wings_."

Because they're gone, now, and only two ragged half-cauterized sections of tissue remain to show where they were. Mary takes her cardigan off and presses it hard to the wounds to try and staunch the bleeding, and he moans at the agony, involuntarily.

Then both of them are blinded by a brilliant light, and his sister is with them. In her hand is the gory sword she had used to cut his wings off, and Mary, perceiving a threat, scrambles up and stands between her and John.

"Back away from him, lady," she says, firmly.

Curled on the floor and looking at his sister with new eyes, John is dazzled at the sight of her. He wonders if this was how he had looked to Mary the first time she had seen him… remote, alien, engraved with shimmering coppery scripture that he can no longer understand.

Next to her, Mary looks like what she is: slight, mortal, and fragile, a creature of another order entirely. And standing there in fierce and pointless defiance of something infinitely more powerful than she is…. beautiful.

"He did this," his sister says, "For you. You will never understand how great a sacrifice it was. Look on what you have done, and remember it, and _be worthy._ "

She raises the sword, and the painful wounds of his lost wings disappear. So does his sister.

In the sudden silence of the house, John looks at Mary, her hands soaked to the wrists in his blood. She stares down at him for a moment, and then flings herself into his arms.

* * *

For the better part of a month John does not leave the tiny terraced house. That's how long it takes him to start adjusting, a process which begins when Mary helps him to his (uncertain) feet and he looks down at her… except he doesn't have to look very _far_ down at all.

The first thing he ever says with his human mouth is, "I'm - short, now, aren't I?"

Mary bites her lip and demurs, "You're… short _er_."

It's actually rather a lot to take in at once. His teeth now need to be cleaned, his hair combed, his face and body washed. Getting from one place to another requires more than just a thought. Digestion, when you aren't used to it, is a horror story. The evening routine of laying down and hallucinating vividly for eight hours is a literal nightmare.

He has some sort of nerve damage in his left arm and hand, and his right leg is excruciatingly painful for no immediately obvious reason, though he suspects darkly that it may be a reminder of a mortal man whose hip he dislocated, long ago, at the ford of Jabbok.

Three days in, Mary comes to him, carrying a large cardboard box. Looking uncertain, she says, "This just came in the mail."

"What is it?" John asks, dazedly.

"Have a look."

He does. The box is filled brimful with papers and materiel relating to one John H. _Watson._ There's identity cards, a birth certificate, school-leaving certificates… and a medical license, which clarifies to him why among the scattered wreckage of his intellect the anatomy and physiology components have been left intact.

"I was working on getting some of these things for you, but… this is way more in-depth than anything I could have done. And as far as I can tell they're _real!_ I went and looked up John H. Watson online and there are some photos of _you_ and a few little mentions about stuff that you've, apparently, done. Look, these? These are medical discharge papers from the army. I _told_ you that scar looked like a gunshot wound."

John raises a hand to his left shoulder, where a starburst of knotted tissue now marks his body, along with a dozen other scars of the more minor injuries that a man of his age would be expected to have accumulated. This body, this box, represent a human life. _His_ life, now.

He closes the box up and looks at the lid. The return address is blurred beyond legibility. Perhaps it also represents a farewell.


	3. Chapter 3

The best he can say for his behavior over the next several months is that he never raises a hand to Mary.

It's harder to be John Watson than he ever could have imagined. He tries, truly, to adapt to his damaged body and slowed mind. He's held back by the fact that the world is just as dark as ever, except now he is almost incapable of doing anything about it and in constant, unending physical pain.

There's some self-medication, with alcohol. He gets a job, then loses it, and really only gets another because there's a critical GP shortage and the next practice was willing to strain a point. Then there comes the day where John receives a radiologist's report on a beautiful three-year-old patient of his who has started having balance problems and has to deliver the diagnosis of a brainstem glioma to her parents. That night he drinks until he blacks out and wakes up in a jail cell.

Ultimately John isn't charged with a crime, since it had (apparently) been in self defense. This does not change the fact that he beat a man so badly he had to be hospitalized and nearly lost the use of an eye.

Throughout all this, Mary is his rock, though she gets quieter and sadder… and expert at patching up the holes he keeps punching in the walls. Her arms, her bed, the shadowy secret parts of her body, are the only places where nothing hurts at all.

Then about two months after his first encounter with childhood cancer, she vanishes. John searches for her for three days with increasing desperation, knowing that he can't ask the police for help.

He returns late at night to the tiny house at the end of the Metropolitan line to find her standing in the living room, arms folded, looking calmly at him. When John rushes forward and demands an explanation, she says coolly, "I didn't get my period, and I started feeling sick in the mornings, so I took a pregnancy test, and it was positive. I don't know how, I've not missed a pill or anything but I suppose somebody has to end up in that one percent failure rate. But then I started bleeding. And I went to the doctor and had an ultrasound and they could see a sac but no… no heartbeat, no baby."

His heart aches for Mary, and for himself, and he says, "You didn't have to run away and do this alone. I want to help you-"

John reaches out to embrace her but she pushes him back with a flat palm on his chest, hard enough to hurt.

"No. John, you don't understand. I _left_ because of the positive pregnancy test. I _came back_ because of the miscarriage. I left," and she's speaking faster now, almost hysterically, "Because I had to see if I could bear to leave you for good, or have an abortion. Those were really the choices available to me, John, because I will _not_ bring a child into this house. Not with you the way you are now."

Mary sinks to her knees, laughing shockily as he stands above her, and says, "Good thing God made the decision for me, I guess. And I know _I_ deserve whatever happens to me but, John… I hate that this happened to _you_. You should have just let me kill myself, back in Almaty. You'd be better off.."

He sits on the floor next to her and takes her in his arms, and this time she lets him, burying her face in his shoulder as she sobs.

He holds her as tightly as he can, and whispers into her hair, "That's not true. Mary, I promise it's not true. I can fix this. I can get better."

* * *

Slowly, with great difficulty, he does. For her, where he couldn't do it for himself.

He decides that it's best to begin as he means to go on. He's a human man now, and his problems are human problems and hopefully have human solutions. So as soon as the surgery opens the day after their come-to-Jesus moment John sees his GP, relates a carefully edited version of his story, and comes away with a referral to a therapist and a prescription for Prozac.

The fluoxitene helps, a bit, since he has a bloody brain neurochemistry now. The therapy helps more… although he can't really tell Ella anything close to the truth, the treatments for "major depressive disorder" and "PTSD" turn out to be mostly results-oriented rather than the in-depth soul searching he had expected, and the truth doesn't matter much. Over time, he finds that trying to get better… actually works.

There are hard days, of course. The world has as many problems as ever and being a doctor means seeing a lot of the worst that happens to humanity. The answer to this, he learns, is to follow Mary's example. Using brute force and ignorance, since that's all you have available, make _your_ little corner a better place.

Mary watches him go through this, and slowly the tension that she carries with her drops away and her smiles return. One day he finds her with an empty circular blister pack of birth control pills, and she says, "I was thinking I'd like to stop taking these."

"If you're sure?" he asks.

"I'm sure," she says, and wraps her arms around him, rests her head on his shoulder. It takes his breath away.

The pain doesn't ever really stop, John just learns to live with it, mostly. It takes a while, and the leg is the most problematic, though since medicine is never adequately able to explain _why_ it defaults to the assumption that it's all part of his array of mental illnesses. The doctors may even be right. When they marry, two years into his new life, he still carries a cane since he knows he will need it when he's tired… though because he has developed _vanity_ , he stashes it in the rectory for the ten minute private ceremony. But by the time their son is born, six months after _that_ , he's left the stick behind him for good.

The birth is twelve hours of agony for Mary, and in one of those spasms of empathy he's now subject to he vows that he will _never_ impose his unfortunate desires on her again. But afterwards there is calm and quiet, and John is handed a baby and allowed to see what he will make of it.

Harry is quite an average size for a newborn, and is thus unspeakably small. He could stretch out on John's forearm, but does not, preferring to curl into an angry ball and yowl at the indignities imposed upon him.

Looking down at his firstborn son, John truly realizes, for the first time, that he is going to die. Not just in an academic sense anymore, he knows it in his viscera: this little boy will grow into the man who will help carry his casket, throw the first handful of earth into his grave, and then sojourn on into a future that John will never get to see for himself.

Harry grips his father's thumb with that strange infant strength and starts to settle down, grizzling softly. The baby's hands are so tiny and delicate it seems impossible that they will ever become just… ordinary human hands, like his. In fact this whole reproducing yourself thing strikes John as a ridiculously fragile and tenuous type of immortality.

But it's _so_ much better than the old type. He turns to tell his wife this, but she's fallen asleep, exhausted. John smiles, and looks back to Harry, who he decides doesn't need to be put in his bassinet _quite_ yet. He'll tell Mary later, there's no rush. They have all the time they'll need.

* * *

He keeps his vow of celibacy for precisely nine weeks, which is how long it takes for Mary to get fed up with it, bounce a box of condoms off his head, and announce, "Time for a new experience, angel."

A year later John is cajoled, enticed, and frankly nagged into throwing the prophylactics away, and a year after _that_ Harry is joined by Mike, who is as placid and serene as his older brother is fierce and intense. The decision to have a third is easier… Mary just says wistfully, "It would be _nice_ to have a little girl" and he finds himself saying, "Yeah, it would." When Charlotte eventually turns up after an unusually lengthy (but enjoyable) interval of "trying", she knows from the moment of her birth exactly how the world should be run, and is not shy of expressing it.

Every one of them is conceived in love, and the tiny house at the end of the Metropolitan line is filled with laughter. And children, and children's toys, to the point where they finally have to buy the place next door and knock through the walls to turn "tiny" into "small."

By this point both of them are old pros at the whole labor-and-delivery bit, but all the same Mary is surprised when _John_ is the one to say, "You know now that we've got four bedrooms we could probably manage another baby."

Mary raises her eyebrows and says, "Speaking as the one who has to carry them for nine months and then violently expel them, _I_ suspect we're finished. And you've changed _your_ tune, haven't you?"

"What do you mean?"

"Back when Harry was born, and you went through that whole thing where you were going on about how some early Christian sects believed in celibacy even within marriage?"

John looks at her quizzically, and she smiles and says, "Remember? You were so upset that childbirth was painful for me that you were actually endorsing _Marcionism,_ "Denounced as heretical by Tertullian but really I think they had a lot of very valid points, Mary." But now you're all, "Next time you're out, pick up milk… oh, and just possibly squeeze out another of my ninety-fifth percentile head circumference children while you're at it?" So much for romance."

He kisses her, because that's almost always appropriate, and says, "I didn't realize how tough you were back then. _And_ I didn't realize how much better our kids would be than other kids. We owe it to _society_ , Mary."

She laughs and kisses him back and moves on. But the truth was, he'd forgotten how he'd felt, back when all of this was new.

* * *

Because he's _able_ to forget things, now. Ordinary little things, like his PIN number or where he's left his keys, and big things like the fact that he's married to an ex-assassin and has only actually been a human being for about a decade. Sometimes he'll go for days at a time without thinking about the latter, until something reminds him.

Usually, that something is Mary, because Mary doesn't ever forget _anything_ as far as John can tell. She doesn't mention the early part of their relationship unless he brings it up, but there's sometimes things that make him think she's remembering it. A shadow over her eyes, an excess of restraint in a marital spat... the tension in her muscles when she sees a potential threat.

She didn't see the demon, the first time.

Harry was still in arms at that point, and was fussing in his papoose on Mary's chest. They were waiting for a table to open up at a noisy, crowded brunch restaurant. Brunch, John considers, is one of the greatest human inventions. It helps him treat what he had initially mistaken for "righteous wrath" but has turned out to mostly be "low blood sugar." Then _it_ had walked in, in company with a stout, smiling older woman.

The demon looked like a very ordinary sort of man, tall and gawky with a shock of lank white-blonde hair. Based on appearance alone, there was no reason for John to feel nausea and dread, but he could practically smell the brimstone on it.

He looked to Mary, who had always been able to sense _him_ , but her focus was on the baby. And yet… she was cupping Harry's bald head protectively, and the fine blonde hairs on her arms were standing up.

That decided him, and John had said abruptly, "This is taking forever, let's go someplace else," and escorted Mary out.

It didn't notice any of this, all of that tribe tending to be hyperfocused. His little family was safe. But even years afterwards John sometimes wonders what happened to the smiling older woman. Being a human, sometimes, is an endless lesson that sometimes there is nothing you can do.

* * *

There are other occasions like that, though they are happily very rare. Knowing when demons are near is a bloody unsettling superpower to have when you lack the ability to do anything about it. He learns he can also still tell when one of his old kind is close, although since angels aren't usually secretive creatures _that_ incident was just an entirely unnecessary hit of the whim-whams. He could _see_ the wings and the incomprehensible writing glowing on her skin, after all. And of course angels and demons are the fodder of the nightly news, since the revelation of the divine has given people delightful new reasons to have pogroms and genocides.

All of it, now, is only tangentially relevant to him, in the same way it's relevant to everyone else on earth. None of them ever acknowledge him or seek him out.

It's a bit bitter, that. But the bitterness just acts as a contrast to the sweetness of everything else in his life: his children growing up strong and healthy around him, the little inroads he makes into the evils of the world with his daily work… and Mary. Who is still the sweetest of all.

"Stunned by joy," he says, one summer evening, sitting in the garden he and Mary have made, watching their sons and daughter at play.

"Sorry?"

"For my epitaph. That's what I want. Should you find yourself in the position of picking one out someday."

"John Watson," Mary growls, taking a fistful of his shirtfront, " _You_ are going to live forever. I'll make sure of it."

And she kisses him and kisses him and kisses him until their children's groans of revulsion force them to stop.

* * *

On the day a worried Molly Hooper shows up at his office with shimmering angelic text imprinted on her palm, immediately followed by an agitated Sherlock with his big black wings and a missing bit of scripture over his heart, John sits in his quiet exam room afterwards. This was _not_ quite what he'd been expecting out of the morning.

He laughs to himself.

"Lucky bastard. He's got no idea what he's in for."

Then he goes to tell Mary all about it.

* * *

The religious texts marked on John's body are from the Bible, Matthew 10:34, the Bhagavad Gita Ch.9 v. 32, and the Quran "The Women" 135. The man whose hip John dislocated was the patriarch Jacob, which story is in Genesis 32 in the Old Testament/Torah. The line about the work not yet being completed is from the Talmud, Ethics of the Fathers, chapter 2 v 14.

The bit about humans being the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape is from Terry Pratchett's "Hogfather."

There's some general theming taken from the Vertigo comics conception of spirituality and religion, so props to Neil Gaiman, Mike Carey, John Ney Reiber, and the rest.


End file.
